About METACLIP

Overview

Having an effective way of dealing with data provenance is a necessary condition to ensure reproducibility, helping to build trust and credibility in research outcomes and the data products delivered.

METACLIP is a language-independent framework envisaged to tackle the problem of climate product provenance description. The solution is based on semantics exploiting the web standard Resource Description Framework (RDF), building on domain-specific extensions of standard vocabularies (e.g. PROV-O) describing the different aspects involved in climate product generation.

Key strengths

  • Open and community-driven initiative
  • Flexible and powerful, allowing encoding of any conceptual framework
  • Adds domain-specific semantics to the schema, based on expert knowledge and climate community support
  • Provenance information is granular and accessible to non-experts
  • Extensible and reusable, importing from already existing standard vocabularies
  • User-friendly visual representation tailored to the needs of users with different needs and varying levels expertise

Linked International Projects and Initiatives

METACLIP is aligned with currently on-going initiatives facing the problems of data provenance and metadata encoding of climate products in different contexts:

  • The COST Action VALUE, providing a European Network for a comprehensive validation and development of statistical downscaling methods.
  • The QA4Seas Project (Quality Assurance for Multi-model Seasonal Forecast Products), aimed at developing a strategy for the evaluation and quality control (EQC) of the multi-model seasonal forecasts provided by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) to respond to the needs identified among a wide range of stakeholders.


Example figure. Schematic representation of a data workflow to generate a verification map (Area under the ROC Curve, based on tercile categories) of a seasonal forecasting system (ECMWF System-4) of mean JJA global temperature. The verifying reference is the ECMWF ERA-Interim reanalysis. All the necessary metadata for the reconstruction of the figure is encoded in RDF (Resource Description Framework) and embedded in the final outcome (in this case a jpeg file, but any other type may serve as well). See this demo for a graphical representation of the metadata schema associated with this figure.